Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/806

 of total quiescence, and the tedious operations of the dressing-room which follow are certainly the reverse of recreation. Dinner in pleasant company no doubt affords recreation of a mental kind were such recreation required, which in this case it certainly is not. After dinner, during the season, she probably receives an evening party, goes to the opera, or indulges in some other kind of amusement which keeps her in hot rooms with vitiated air till the small hours of the morning. At last she retires to rest, complaining that her delicacy of constitution makes her a martyr to headaches, languid circulation, lassitude, and feelings of sickness. Now contrast such a wholly unnatural state of things with the daily life of a country girl to whom exercise is felt to be a sine qua non of existence, and do not wonder at the contrast between her state of blooming health and the feeble stamina of the lady whose position requires her to adopt the habits of town life. Ladies will no doubt tell me that these remarks are trite, and that they all knew before the desirability of taking exercise. I can only reply, if "ye knew these things happy are ye if you do them." And why not do them? Why not make the duty of taking daily exercise as important an article in your social creed as the duty of returning calls? If you say there is no time, the answer is preposterous. Senior wranglers could never have been senior wranglers had they not found time for their pull upon the Cam; and by not making time for exercise you are merely shortening the time of your life. Every day you can easily find time for a ride; or, if you are not able to ride, you may take every day a two hours' walk with some companion or object to make it a pleasurable walk. Such companions and objects are not difficult to obtain in the town; and in the country there are several kinds of outdoor amusements—such as rowing, riding, skating, lawn tennis, etc.—which are happily recognized by the stern laws of etiquette as suitable for ladies, and which in performance are singularly graceful as well as highly conducive to good spirits. Dancing is also in itself an admirable form of exercise, though its beneficial effects are usually much more than counteracted by the late hours and excessive exhaustion of the ballroom. This excessive exhaustion of the muscular, but more especially of the nervous energies, may, in this as in all other similar cases, be properly denoted by the term which is the correlative of recreation—viz., dissipation. For although it has become customary to restrict the application of this term only to extreme cases, and to apply it to less extreme cases merely as a joke, both in etymology and in physiology the term dissipation is alike appropriate to all degrees of wasteful expenditure of the vital energies.

In recommending bodily exercise thus strongly, I speak of course to young and to middle-aged ladies; but I am sure that even here there are very few who could walk their five or six miles a day without fatigue. This merely shows to what a state of enervation their habitual neglect of exercise has reduced them. Such enfeebled